Getting Ready for the CentOS 7 Upgrade
Aug. 13, 2018—(Update, 8/13/2018) This is a friendly reminder to please test your workflows in the CentOS 7 environment as soon as possible. See our website for regular updates on the number of cores on the CentOS 6 side versus CentOS 7 side. We will be deploying a large number of new Intel Xeon Skylake-based processors in...
[Resolved] CentOS 7 login not working
Aug. 8, 2018—Update, 8/9/18: This appears to be resolved. We are looking into issues with logging in to the ACCRE CentOS 7 gateway this afternoon and we will update this when we have more information. In the meantime you may continue to use login.accre.vanderbilt.edu to access the cluster. Thanks! Updated 4:52pm to clarify that it is CentOS 7...
[Resolved] Tape recovery on files impacted by May 29 disk failure is now complete
Jul. 23, 2018—Update, 7/23/2018: After nearly two months, the tape recovery on /data and /scratch is virtually complete and we will go ahead and mark this as resolved. This has to do with the logical disk failure on May 29 that caused 5% of files on /data and /scratch to become unavailable. It is unrelated to the...
[Resolved] Brief cluster maintenance for Monday, July 23rd has been cancelled
Jul. 19, 2018—Update, 7/22/2018: We are canceling the maintenance described below. Since this email was sent, we learned that a drive in one of our storage appliances was in a bad state (not bad enough to trigger our monitoring but bad enough to impact performance). On Saturday morning we proactively failed over to a spare drive and...
[Resolved] Some compute nodes offline for rebooting; /data and /scratch maintenance complete
Jul. 9, 2018—Update, 7/15/2018: The reboot is nearly complete; we will go ahead and mark this as resolved. Update, 7/15/2018: The maintenance is complete and /scratch and /data are available on all gateways and most of the rest of the cluster. However, there are a moderate number of compute nodes that will need to be rebooted to get the...
/data and /scratch back online and hardware maintenance complete; performance is being monitored
Jul. 2, 2018—Update, 8/13/2018: Performance seems better so far since the work last week, but we won’t know for sure until the system is under heavier load. Update, 8/9/2018, 2pm: A short while ago we resolved the issue preventing the disks from being brought back online in GPFS. You should now be able to access your /scratch and...
Staff Spotlight: Davide Vanzo
Jul. 2, 2018—Davide has been working as an Application Developer at ACCRE since 2015. His primary responsibilities include building software on the cluster, helping users troubleshoot issues, and running detailed benchmarks to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, especially those involving GPU and parallel computing. In his spare time, Davide enjoys cycling and riding his motorcycle.
Staff Spotlight: Alan Tackett
Jul. 2, 2018—Alan is the lead developer of LStore, a highly scalable filesystem that is used in production for the CMS Tier 2 project. As the technical director of ACCRE, Alan draws from his deep expertise in all things storage, networking, and computing to help guide and architect various aspects of the ACCRE environment. Alan has been...
Staff Spotlight: Matt Heller
Jul. 2, 2018—Matt is a graduate of Vanderbilt’s Engineering program and in fact he first worked for ACCRE as an intern in his undergraduate days prior to joining the team in a software developer position in 2009. Matt wears many hats, among them he is the lead network engineer and the primary for the ACCRE tape backup...
Staff Spotlight: Jacob Roberts
Jul. 2, 2018—Jacob is a graduate of Tennessee Tech University and has been with ACCRE since 2013. His primary responsibilities at ACCRE include managing custom gateways for research groups and maintaining Nagios, the monitoring software used by ACCRE. In his free time, Jacob enjoys swing dancing.